Hello, and thank you for joining me today. I’m Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes compassion and respect for chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other domesticated birds.
Today I want to speak to you about the idea of scientifically “enhancing” the intelligence of other animals, and about conferring “personhood” on machines that have been programmed to display Artificial Intelligence, or so-called AI. Broadly speaking, Artificial Intelligence refers to any human-like behavior imitated by a machine, mimicked by a Robot.
At a 2013 conference on “Personhood Beyond the Human,” at Yale University, some speakers suggested that scientists might “engineer” animals genetically to be more intelligent than they already are, while others suggested that certain technological inventions of ours – the artificial intelligences – might eventually qualify for moral consideration and even the status of “personhood,” which would grant them certain legal “rights” and protections, in short, a status that undeniably sentient animals are, to this day, denied. A recent Court decision that refused to grant Happy the Elephant the status of Personhood, and is forcing her to remain, alone and miserable, in the Bronx Zoo, is an example.
To this day, we know almost nothing about the ways in which other animals’ intelligences relate to the totality of their being including their own well-being and sense of self. Consider that we are nowhere near to granting legal or moral consideration or even a shred of compassionate treatment, let alone “personhood,” to billions of sensitive and intelligent birds and other creatures suffering in laboratories, factory farms, and elsewhere.
Given that an animal’s brain is an integral part of an animal’s body, the idea of genetically engineering other animals’ brains to “enhance” their cognitive abilities seems more like anthropomorphic arrogance than an advancement of ethics or empathy. The idea contradicts and undermines the ethical goal of obtaining legal recognition and protection of an animal’s fundamental right of bodily integrity and liberty.
The notion of a brain disconnected from the animal in whom it is situated is implicit in proposals to “enhance” the mental capabilities of other creatures through surgical or genetic manipulation, or both. In “Brains, Bodies, and Minds: Against a Hierarchy of Animal Faculties,” David Dillard-Wright rejects the “decapitation” theory of consciousness.” He observes, rather, the intricate processes and intelligences of the body and the continuity of body and brain within and as constituents of bodies, which are themselves environmentally situated and interactive with their surroundings. All of the evidence we have shows evolutionary continuity among animal species and a reasoned belief that other animals’ minds are not mere “precursors” of human ways of knowing but rather “parallel” ways of being mentally active and alive in this world.
It may seem that proposals to enhance the minds of nonhuman animals are in opposition to proposals to expunge their minds in order to fit them “more humanely” into our abusive systems. Philosopher Peter Singer, agribusiness philosopher Paul Thompson, and architecture student Andre Ford are among those MEN who have variously supported “welfare” measures which they claim would reduce the suffering of industrially-raised chickens by inflicting injuries on them, that include de-winging, debeaking, blinding, and de-braining them. Proposals to enhance or expunge animal consciousness have much in common. Both presume human entitlement to reconfigure the bodies and psyches of other creatures to fit our schemes and satisfy our lust for manipulating life and lives to reflect our will. Both involve rationalizations that the animals targeted for these procedures are not victims, but, rather, beneficiaries of the traumas our species sees fit to impose on them “for their own good.”
It is not unreasonable to worry that robots could be granted a status of legal and ethical “personhood” long before, if ever, chickens and the majority of other animals are so elevated. The minds and personalities of chickens, chimpanzees, and other nonhuman animals will never be able to compete against the dazzle of computers and digital wonders that intoxicate so many of the kinds of people whose power and ambition are manipulating the course of this planet. How can nonhuman animals, whose intelligences, however “high,” are deemed inferior to humans’, compete with the machines that so many brag are even “smarter” than we are?
As for “the kinds of people whose power and ambition are manipulating the course of the planet,” here’s a recent example of how such people think about this planet and its occupants. On September 18, 2022, The Washington Post reported on a recent meeting of Billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg and others described in the article as “enraged” that one of their own (who was not at the meeting) said he will donate his company’s fortune to fighting Climate Change.
These Billionaires agreed that this planet is “a trash heap anyway and good for little besides flying over it in a spacecraft.” Who would want to invest resources in a world where some people are without clean water and food and have to bankrupt themselves to receive medical care? Any effort to preserve this place for more miserable generations would be a waste of energy better used “making phones smaller and then bigger again. Money is simply best spent on oneself.”
Presumably these MEN, floating above the trash heap in their so-called Metaverse, could not distinguish between a monkey and a muskrat. Even less could they care what happens to the other creatures on Earth as a result of the heartless human behavior that they themselves represent.
Such thinking – which I call in my sense, “artificial intelligence” – may be contrasted with signs pointing in a different direction that could lead to a different conclusion. In an article titled “According Animals Dignity,” published in The New York Times, in 2014, columnist Frank Bruni described what he saw as a “broadening, deepening concern about animals, that is no longer sufficiently captured by the phrase ‘animal welfare.’” Citing examples, including the Nonhuman Rights Project, Bruni argued that we are entering an era of “animal dignity” in modern society and that the signs of this era are “everywhere.”
I leave it to you who are listening to this podcast to decide which “signs” you believe are the most prophetic about the future of Life on this planet. Thank you for your attention, and for joining me today, and please join me for the next podcast episode of Thinking Like a Chicken – News & Views. And have a wonderful day.